A Retired Brigadier General's Lessons from the War in Afghanistan by Don Harvel - The National Interest
America's top brass can no longer operate under the assumption that every problem is the responsibility of the U.S. military.
For the last several months, U.S. special representative Zalmay Khalilzad has been deeply involved in a negotiation with the Taliban—an effort that may or may not lead to a comprehensive political resolution of the seventeen-year-long Afghan conflict. For the sake of peace in Afghanistan, we should all hope that Khalilzad—a man of eminent experience who has worked on the Afghan portfolio for decades—can pull a rabbit out of his hat and close the book on this latest bloody chapter in Afghanistan’s history.
But while those of us on the outside wait to see whether peace negotiations with the Taliban produce a lasting and positive result, it’s important for America’s national-security insiders to look back at where we are; whether what we’ve done works; and what lessons we should extrapolate in order to avoid similar endless wars in the future.
The U.S. war in Afghanistan started off in the most noblest of ways. The September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York, Washington, DC and rural Pennsylvania shocked the conscience of the entire world. If there was ever an instance in history of a justifiable military operation, the U.S. military campaign against Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan fit the bill perfectly. Operation Enduring Freedom, planned and executed with a specific and clear mission—eliminating Al Qaeda’s base of operations—was a classic case of self-defense. The U.S. military succeeded in this objective in a matter of months. By the winter of 2002, Osama bin Laden was on the run, his network was degraded, and the same Taliban officials that ruled Kabul with an iron-first were now running for their lives, hoping to avoid capture…